The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 264. Beyond Order: Rule 2 - Imagine Who You Could Be, and Then Aim Single-Mindedly at That.

Episode Date: June 24, 2022

In this episode of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, we continue our dive into Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life. This compilation episode is focused on Rule 2: "Imagine who you could be, and then aim single-mindedly at that." It includes interviews with Dave Rubin, Tom Bilyeu, Chris Williamson, and more.Videos Included:00:00 - Rule 2 Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life - 02:27 - Rubin Report: An Emotional Return & 12 More Rules for Life12:47 - Aubrey Marcus: Jordan Petersons' EMPOWERING MESSAGE to Take Responsibility For Your Life33:13 - Impact Theory: Jordan Peterson on Constructing Your Identity, Chaos and Order, and the Escalating Culture Wars41:38 - Modern Wisdom: Jordan Peterson - Take Control Of Your Life47:28 - Beyond Order The Illustrator - Juliette Fogra on JBP

Rule 2 is, imagine who you could be, and then aim single-mindedly at that. This paragraph is taken from a chapter subsection entitled, Who Are You, and Who Could You Be? An unforgettable story captures the essence of humanity and distills, communicates, and clarifies it, bringing what we are and what we should be into focus. It speaks to us, motivating the attention that inspires imitation. We learn to see and act in the manner of the heroes of the stories that captivate us. These stories call to capacities that lie deep within our nature, but might still never develop without that call. We are dormant adventurers, lovers, leaders, artists and rebels, but need to discover that

we are all those things by seeing the reflection of such patterns in dramatic and literary form. That is part of being a creature that is part nature and part culture. An unforgettable story advances our capacity to understand our behavior beyond habit and expectation toward an imaginative and then verbalized understanding. Such a story presents us in the most compelling manner with the ultimate adventure, the divine romance and the eternal battle between good and evil. All this helps us clarify our understanding of moral and immoral attitude, personal and social.

This can be seen everywhere, and always. Question. Who are you, or at least, who could you be? Answer. Part of the eternal force that constantly confronts the terrible unknown, voluntarily. Part of the eternal force that transcends naivety and becomes dangerous enough in a controlled manner to understand evil and beard it in its lair. And part of the eternal force that faces chaos and turns it into productive order, or the takes order that has become too restrictive, reduces it to chaos, and renders it productive once again.

And all of this, being very difficult to understand consciously, but vital to our survival, is transmitted in the form of the stories that we cannot help but attend to. And it is in this manner that we come to apprehend what is a value, what we should aim at, and what we could be. So chapter two is imagine who you could be, and then aim single-mindedly at that. And for me, after being on tour with you, I think that's something that got into me through osmosis, that I would be on stage, and even though everyone was there for you, I thought, hey, I'm part of this somehow. This thing somehow I became part of this. And then once I realized that when the PA announcer said my name, that those people knew me, I thought, that on me, I'm the guy they're talking about, like I'm doing, and then that just that, it helped my aim.

I'm talking about, like, I'm doing things. And then that, just that, it helped my aim. It helped my aim. And I wonder how many people just don't, they don't know how to aim because they have no experience like that. Something like that. Well, that's part of what tradition is supposed to teach you by presenting you with examples of great people of the past.

The lesson is not supposed to be exactly bow down and worship these people. It's be like them, be like them, and you could be. And I mean, that's really the goal of the humanities, when it's the humanities. If it's not, if that's the goal, then students will study the humanities. As soon as that ceases to be the goal, then there's nothing of value there. Great literature tells you the great story of good and evil always. It's good and evil against the background of chaos and order, always. And the evil characters are there to be bad examples, and the good characters are there

to be good examples. Or you see the interplay of those forces within a single person. And it's a reminder of who you could be. And you can find out who you should be. It's actually, and this is something quite mysterious, I believe, and part of the proof, let's say, that we exist in a world of value, your conscience tells you who you should be. Now, that doesn't mean that necessarily

that it's infallible, but people wrestle with their conscience. You know, there isn't anyone. I've never met anyone who is, you know, I'm not, I'm narcissists accepted, that's say, people are generally tormented by their conscience. And the reason for that is that they're not they're deviating from the path that is their destiny. And if you don't think that, well, then what do you think? What do you think that conscience is? I mean, I've asked my classes repeatedly. Do you have a little voice in your head that tells you when you've done something wrong, or you're about to or a feeling? And they all, they all immediately agree with that. No one finds that a foreign concept.

And so if you don't know who you are, your conscience will remind you when you're not, or sorry, if you don't know who you could be, your conscience will remind you when you deviate. And then you can start to attend to that. Think, well, look, I'm actually ashamed when I do this. I should stop, unless I want to be ashamed all the time, it looks like I should stop. And then maybe you stop doing that, and then your conscience subjects to something else,

and maybe you stop doing that. And as that happens, you start to develop a vision of who you could be. And the chapter indicates it looks at symbolic representations. It's an examination of a certain symbolic representation of the ideal. And so it's my attempt to assess tradition for what it can tell us about what the ideal human being might be like. And the ideal human being is the person who forthrightly upholds the traditions of the culture and forges away into the unknown.

We went through that and pulls new information in and rebuilds himself and the world. And that's who you could be. And now the difficulty comes in figuring out how to do that within the confines of your own life. So in some sense, that's how to bring the divine to earth. There's this divine pattern, but it's general. See, this is one of the mysterious things about Christianity that's so remarkable about it is that there's the the the the the Christ that's eternal the word of God say so that's it's a representation of something Absolutely transcendent, but it's married to the particulars of one particular time in space and obviously

Critics of Christianity regard that is one of its major flaws Christianity, regard that as one of its major flaws, you know, that there's this idea of God who is a carpenter in some out of the way place, in some out of the way time. But you're someone in an out of the way place at a particular time and place. And for you, what that means is that for you to make contact with the highest of values, you have to bring that down to your particulars and figure out how you do that. It's going to be a way that no one else does it because you're the only one that's you. But you can aim at something, aim at something. The point of the chapter is that you aim at something and that will shape you as you move towards it. And then your aim will change, you'll move, but that doesn't matter.

It gets you going, and you'll be molded across time more and more into the person you could be. Can you talk about that just from a personal perspective as someone that I've seen do it? I mean, that's what I saw you do every night. You would take your intellectual curiosity to the end of where it would go. Sometimes you would get off stage and say to me, oh, you know, I took that as far as I could tonight.

And then the next night, you would go a little bit further with it or a little bit further. And I knew there were moments because we did so many shows. I knew when you were a little past where you would wanna go. And then I could see you come back. But can you talk about what that was like

for you in terms of your life, how you felt, how time felt, how the relationship with the audience felt when you're doing it right? Because I feel like people don't know that. When you're doing it right, what does it feel like? Well, to begin with, and this happened when I was in graduate school, I had a lot of bad habits. I smoked like a pack of cigarettes a day and I drank a lot. I came from this little town in Northern Alberta and like many little towns, especially in Northern Canada, alcohol overuse is derigger.

It's, and so, I noticed when I was in my early 20s that the only time I really regretted what I had done was when I was drinking. Now, it was also interfering with me writing because I couldn't concentrate well enough if I was hungover, but I also couldn't really concentrate. I couldn't tolerate the emotional strain of what I was writing about when I was hungover. It was too, I couldn't handle being on the edge because I destabilized my nervous system. In any case, I stopped drinking, and the reason for that was, well, I decided I didn't want

to be ashamed of what I was doing anymore. It seemed I thought, well, maybe I could not do things that were shameful and then see what my life was like. So that was sort of on the negative end, the constraint end. I think people get on the more positive end, people get deeply involved in what they're doing if they're in the right place and the right time. So I would say you can tell this is the idea of heaven on

earth to some degree, when time stops, when you're not aware of the duration of time, when you're so engaged with what you're doing, that you're not aware of the duration of time, then you've got the forces of chaos balanced and order balanced properly. You're not stultified in board, that's an excessive order. Everything's too predictable. You're not overwhelmed. You're dealing with, it's like you're playing tennis at the peak of your game. That's partly what people experience when they're great athletes, when they play. The zone, yeah. And they're always stretching themselves to their limit.

You can tell that if you watch a gymnast, for example, who has a brilliant performance, they've stretched themselves beyond their domain of competence during the performance. And that's what makes everybody leap to their feet. That's the incarnation given embodiment right there in front of you for some moments. And everyone cheers that on. Do you think it's weird how it becomes a fleeting moment in a way? Like I know, I know what you're saying is true. And when I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing and I'm on my game and my thoughts are

right and straight time just moves. And then I go, whoa, a month passed, a month passed. And I was good that whole time. And I did write that whole time and I was happier and my relationship with David or whoever else is better in that time. But that becomes fleeting and that suddenly you could have a great month

and then suddenly something happens, chaos returns. Like it's that we almost forget that moment. You can't hold it. Well it requires a lot of, it requires even to some degree some good fortune to maintain. I certainly haven't been able to do that while I was ill. And time, one of the consequences of my illness, whatever it was or is, was time dilation. Like days lasted weeks, it seemed like minutes lasted hours. I mean that literally. And that was terrible. The weight of time. It's the weight of brute mortality.

It's the weight of self-consciousness. And you escape that that immersed properly. So, and that second chapter is a pretty practical chapter. It's like, well, if you're not who you want to be, then think about how you could be better. Take a chance, aim at that, work at it and see what happens. So, and that's a disciplinary routine, I would say. Yeah, and I take you out of your current order. One of the sections of your book that I really loved, it was chapter two where you get into alchemy and you get into, you know, a discussion of,

it was one of the richest chapters for me. Helen Lewis said, I sounded like a stone to undergraduates. Well, I must like stone undergraduates. It was so interesting, eh, because this is because she wrote this review in the Atlantic. And I was talking about, sorry, I'll let you get back to this right away, but she was talking about, I commented on this, the snitch in Harry Potter, because I found that it's a very old symbol, that's a really old symbol. It shocked me to death that she used it. I couldn't believe she used it because it's really obscure this symbol. And so I talk about it in the book. And you know, that's what she

dismissed as the ravings of a, you know, stoned undergraduate. But then I thought, well, look, Rowling is richer than the queen. She came from nothing. She produced this empire. It's an absolute empire. Books that were 600 pages long, that she could read to children in stadiums, a whole string of movies that dominated the entertainment landscape for like six years. It was a, it was a cultural, a global cultural phenomenon. It's like, well, don't you think that's worth looking into? That's what makes you a stoned undergraduate. Or are you so clueless that you can't see that when something like that happens, there's a mystery.

It's why in the world would the story of a magical orphan become a multi-billion dollar decades long, global cultural phenomenon. Well, if you're interested in culture, and if you're interested in anything besides narrow politics, you'd think that that would be a... You'd think that would be worthy of investigation. It's not easy to see these things sometimes for the mystery that they are. No doubt.

So, and I think it's what you say about stories. Stories can be true stories. The story of Harry Potter and the Snitch is a true story because it's in resonance with a real idea, something that's in the collective consciousness, something that's in our primordial psyche in a way. And so when we hear it, or trade, or trade, we collect it.

Exactly. We wouldn't all enjoy it. And look, we can go to those movies. We suspend disbelief willingly, instantly. And we get immersed in the story. That's magic. That's magic. What's going on?

It's worthy of investigation. So anyways, I sort of sidetracked that. Well, that's actually exactly where I was going. So I'm going to read this section and you're talking about the snitch as the alchemical symbol of the round chaos. And you say this, the seeker is the person who is playing the game that everyone else is playing and who is a disciplined expert at that game, but who is also playing an

additional higher order game. The pursuit of what is of primary significance, the snitch, like the round chaos, can therefore be considered the container of that primary significance. So for those of us who don't know the Harry Potter movie, there's a game called Quidditch and it's basically like LaCross and you try to get the ball in the goal, but there's a seeker who actually is seeking this magical golden orb, which has alchemical kind of roots in the round chaos. And if they seek that, the game is over. And it's been given that, you know, additional, as you say, primary significance.

And this concept was really, really interesting to me to have it unpacked, because I didn't, I watched some Harry Potter and I saw it and I saw the game. That, of course, didn't occur to me. It was just like, oh, this is the rules to this game. But then I realized, in my own life, there's the game that I'm playing, oh, I'm running on it and I'm doing these things. But what is my snitch? What is my round chaos?

What is that ultimate higher order potential that I'm seeking? And so my question was, have you thought about for you because we can obviously see the game being played as far as the normal quidditch game. But for you, personally, what is your snitch? What is your round chaos that you're seeking the game within the game that you're playing at large? Well, what's always attracted my attention predominantly.

So let me unpack some things here, is there? Some of the interpretation of that symbol. A lot of it came from my reading of Jung because he's the only person that I've ever read who seems to know about such things, even knows that they exist. Jung believed that your interest, which is a relatively involuntary phenomenon, right? You get interested in things, your interest, which is a relatively involuntary phenomenon, right? You get interested in things, but but you can't make yourself interested in something. The interest grabs you and and grasps your attention. And so, Jung thought of that as a deeply seated biological mechanism, which it obviously is. It's a neurological mechanism of some sort that governs

it possesses, it has the capacity to possess your voluntary attention. Just like hunger does, when you get hungry, you're typing away writing a book or something, and you get hungry, hunger starts to grab your attention. Well, look, you're interested in some things and you're not interested in others. Well, why? Well, some of that has to do with your choice, but not that much. A lot of it has to do with who you are in the deepest sense. And you don't believe that you were likely to become interested in things that furthered your development, furthered your psychological development, made you more and more competent.

So for example, you might get interested, you might really come to admire someone, and so what they do grabs your interest. And that happens with children quite a lot, and they get interested in kids who are slightly ahead of them in the developmental curve, and then they mimic them. And so the interest is something that grabs you to move you forward on the developmental curve.

And so it's the manifestation of your potential higher self in the present. And you can describe that as the self, the self was in his view, the totality of your being. It's not definable. It includes you in the future. And you are in some sense something that's coming to be into the future, hopefully to be more than you are, although, you know, not always, because we also degenerate. In any case, your interest pulls you along on a particular developmental pathway. I've always been gripped in some sense by things that are very, very dark. And most of what's, my pathology of one sort of another, which is, of course, partly why I'm a clinical psychologist, you know, but I wanted to remediate it.

I wanted to help, but it was the compulsion to investigate the darkest of darkness. And whether that's been good for me or not, well, that's a different question. I suppose it has been extremely good in some ways and it's been complicated. We could certainly say that. But then more, I wanted to figure out what would protect us from that darkness. And I guess it was because I was so shocked, was so shocked, existentially shocked when I first encountered writings that pertain to the Holocaust and to other genocidal acts of that sort. And I was always interested in that for some reason from a psychological perspective. It was like, what compelled people to do that?

And how can we not do it again? And that, so anyways, anything that focused on that grabbed my interest. That's why I read Jung extensively and Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and Sozhnevs and those are the people I ran across others as well that who seem to have some answers as far as I could tell. And so that's what it's been for me. Yeah, yeah.

And I don't know why. It might be my proclivity towards depression. I really have no, I'm a creative person by temperament. And I also have this depressive illness. Maybe it's the consequence of those two. I don't know. Who knows, right? Who knows? What what what holds you forward? The ancients the ancients would typically externalize these forces. You know, when they couldn't understand it and you talk about that with the God Mercury, the God Mercury was the one that drew you to these different things. Yeah, he's got wings and he's flitters and that's what your attention does. It pulls, it's like in an op, that Pixar movie.

Every time there's a squirrel, the dog. That's their snitch. That's the rip of instinctual forces. It's very comical, but in human beings, I think it's unbelievably sophisticated because I do believe that we're compelled to follow a line that leads to our further development and I do think that that involves mimicry of the hero, for example. The hero psychologically speaking is that figure which represents a potential stage of development for you. And you'll find your hero because you'll admire something or someone.

And why is that? Well, something's wild. I gave you the best explanation for that, that I can. That's, that's the future you in some sense manifesting itself in the present, saying, here's where you could go. Yeah. Another instinct for growth. Another aspect that they externalize was the idea of the Damon, which is almost like

the the Mercurial impulse that's taken and stretched out for a long time. It's something that's continually drawing you towards some potential realization of what you're capable of. And they put that again in this kind of demigod landscape, but of course, that was just their way of understanding. It also makes a tremendous amount of sense like to make rage of God like Mars. Well, yes, why? Well, it's immortal. I mean, rage will be here long after you're gone. You're definitely it's pawn at times. You know, it's not obvious who's in control when you're enraged

Yeah, in fact at at some levels of rage that can even be a legal defense Because we recognize that you can be out of your head your normal personality isn't in control and really powerful motivational forces have that transcendent Reality, it's not and it rages older than human beings motivational forces have that transcendent reality. It's not, and it rages older than human beings. It's really, really old. And it can have you in its grip.

Sexual impulses the same way, hunger. All of these things are unbelievably powerful forces and they don't just operate on the primordial level as far as I'm concerned. They're, there are sophisticated gods of motivation. And we are possessed by them when we do such things as go to movies. We don't notice is what the hell are we doing watching this movie? Why are we entertained by it?

Why does it grip our interest? We don't know. We don't even question it. It's like while it's entertaining, it's fun. It's interesting. If it's interesting, you don't have to justify it. Then you think, right? Well, that's interesting in and of itself. If it's interesting, you don't justify it.

And then someone can tap you on the head and say, look, what you're doing. And you think, oh, yeah, that's kind of odd that I'm doing that. What the hell am I doing? Standing in line for three days to see Star Wars when I'm an atheistic engineer. What's going on here? Oh, look at that. It's a religious impulse. Yeah. And I don't have a religion. And so this is filling the gap. And that's why I go to Star Wars conventions. And I'm possessed by something that I haven't pursued.

And I'm possessed by something that I haven't pursued. One of the things that you wrote was really powerful for me to read because to me, I think it described my snitch, my round chaos, that thing that I'm seeking underneath the games that I'm playing. And so I'm going to read this little snippet here. Who could you be? You could be all that a man or woman might be. You could be the newest avatar in your own unique manner of the great ancestral heroes of the past.

What is the upper limit to that? We do not know. Our religious structures hint at it. How would someone who determined to take full responsibility for the tragedy and malevolence of the world manifest itself? The ultimate question of man is not who we are, but who we could be. That's it.

I mean, I read that, I was like, yep, that's it. There's the snitch with its wings and its golden, you know, mercurious allure that I'm really chasing underneath all of this. And I enjoy all these other things, but. Who could you be? Exactly. You see that in children.

I watched little children play. And what they're doing, you know, they're attempting to grow forward, but they toy with identities. I'm my little granddaughter. I wrote about her in this book too. It's so funny watching her. She had Pocahontas, the Disney movie, and she had

a Pocahontas doll, and she watched that movie a number of times. And then for, while it's been a year now, she's only three and a half, for a whole year. She has two names, Scarlett and Ellie, and one's her middle name, but she's called one or the other. And it seems to be perfectly comfortable with both. If you ask her if she's Ellie, she'll say yes. And if you ask her if she's Scarlet, she'll say yes. But if you ask her if she's Pocahontas, she'll also say yes. And then if you ask her if she is Scarlet, Ellie, or Pocahontas, she'll say she's Pocahontas.

And she's been insisting on that for a whole year. And so she's playing out this role. I don't know how much of her imagination is devoted to it, but enough for this trip. Like that's, if you're, how old are you? 40? Just turn 40. Yeah, okay. So, you know, imagine that you had a fictional identity for 15 years. That's approximately the same relative length of time. And the kids, you know, they weave up a fantasy world and then they play out an identity in that. And then they weave out another fantasy world

and they play out an identity with that. And they shape that identity by their interactions with other children and adults. And hopefully they find an identity that that, and they shape that identity by their interactions with other children and adults. And hopefully they find an identity that suits them that other people also accept, because your identity has to be something that other people accept or it isn't going to work for you. But that's all part of this exploration of who they could be. You know, the play is in fact the the Exercising of that realm of possibilities and so a good father a good parent for that matter But I think this I think at least is an archetypally paternal role puts a border of security around the child

You know and the mother might be inside that border of security when she has young children and play can take place there. And the play is the investigation of multiple entities with the hope of finding one that is functional, that is also socially desired, because those things can't be dissociated. One of the reasons I think that the identity politics has bothered me so much, speaking of snitches, you know, it's bothered me. It's like this bothers me. And I've only recently realized that some of it had to do with what I saw as limitations on free speech, which is I have to say the words that, you know, some authority or some population demands

that I say, which I don't like. But there's something else too, which is that it's based on a very misleading theory of identity. Your identity is not just how you feel about yourself at this moment. And you can't impose that on other people because they don't know how to deal with that. Like, even if they wanted to, they wouldn't know the rules of the game. You have to negotiate your identity with other people. And so then you have to think of identity as something that's negotiated with other people. And so if you have an implicit theory of identity, like the one that seems to be increasingly dominating the cultural landscape, which is identity is something that's only subjectively

determined and can also change from moment to moment, then you're misleading people as they develop because they come up with a very unsophisticated notion of what identity is. And that's not good because that's a core. And part of your identity is your value to other people. That's a huge part of it. And that's not subjective. That's other people make of it. And that's not subjective. That's other

people make that decision. Yeah. And you talk about that. And I think it's chapter three where you say that's one of the ways we keep our sanity is talking to other people and the interaction with our community and all of these other things that isolate us more and more to a to a single subjective perspective is going to lead to a certain madness. It is definitely well, exactly. Well, I tried to impress upon some of the trans activists that were after me when I first made some public statements. I said, look, I don't think, I didn't say it this eloquently, unfortunately. What I would have liked to have said now, at least, was it isn't obvious to me at all that your theory of identity is going to serve the function that you assume it is.

It's not psychologically sophisticated enough. It's not sociologically sophisticated enough. You can't insist that other people play a game that they don't know how to play, especially when you also don't know how to play it, except to say that it exists. And this sanity issue is, a lot of us is externalized because we're such social creatures. And everyone has weaknesses. You're going to degenerate along your weakest axis. And if you're fort and you won't be able to control yourself because some of your weakness will be precisely that inability to control yourself on that axis, like maybe you have

a biological predisposition to alcoholism. And you have three shots of vodka in 20 minutes and you're like on top of the world. There are people like that. They often have extensive family histories of alcoholism. It's a biological phenomenon. You can tell if you're like that if it's really difficult for you to stop drinking once you start. It's a real warning sign. And it means alcohol is a great drug for you, subjectively speaking.

But hopefully, when you drink too much, other people are gonna start telling you. It's like, no, you're, and that's actually how you start diagnosing alcohol abuse. Are you getting in trouble with the law? Is it interfering with your intimate relationships? Is it interfering with your ability to hold a job? It means that the addictive substance is starting

to dominate your life in a manner that's counterproductive. And other people are there to ensure that you stay balanced enough so that you don't deteriorate entirely. You're lucky if you have that. And part of the point I make in that chapter, and I would say in both books and in maps of meaning as well, is that the primary obligation of a parent is to serve as a proxy for the social and the natural world. But let's say the social world, why?

Well because you want to train your child to be not only acceptable socially but highly desirable socially. And the reason for that is that by the time there are about three, three to four is the transition period. They're going to be spending more time being socialized by their peers than by you. And that will increasingly be the case as they develop. And if you haven't made them, if you haven't encouraged them through judicious attention to be socially desirable, they're going to be rejected by their peers and then they fall farther and farther behind on the developmental trajectory.

Jordan, you asked the times person in the full length article or full length recording which I listened to. You said, hey, don't focus on my illness in this focus on why people resonate with my message, which she of course did not. But that leaves. No one does. It leaves me in opening. I'm going to take it right now.

It's so interesting. It's so interesting to see that. It's so interesting because the only time that ever gets addressed is by the mainstream media. Jesus, horrible cliche, but it's usually sort of brushed off and it's usually, well, he seems to be attractive towards young men who are troubled. Well, first of all, that's not so bad, is it? I mean, hypothetically, the most ardent feminist is primarily concerned with helping the troubled young man not be so troubled,

but it's brushed off in a cynical sort of way. And the cynicism is also disbelief that that could possibly be serious, a serious enterprise. Well, I think it's a serious enterprise. Why do you think they're serious? I think it's because who knows the final answer to anything, you know, but I took what I learned about what happened in the second world, war seriously. It's like, wow, we can be really bad. We should do something about that. thing about that. Like that was unacceptable. Well, was it or not? But how unacceptable? Was it change your life? Unacceptable? Better be. If you want it not to happen again. And it's not like the next time it happens, we'll make the previous time look like a picnic. We're way more powerful than we were. You know, when we're getting to the point, something Jung talked about, especially

near the end of his life, we're getting so powerful that each individual is now a force of almost unimaginable destructive power if they so choose to be. And that's just going to, that power is going to continue to increase. And what that means is that the degree to which each of us has our act together is going to be something upon which the world increasingly depends for its maintenance. I'm going to add something to why I think people resonate with you so much. In the book, you encourage people to think from an evolutionary perspective, which I think is incredibly important. And I think what you offer people is one, you make, we all struggle with our own internal demons.

And you allow people to see how that's a heroic endeavor, maybe the ultimate heroic endeavor, to conquer that inside of yourself. And then going back to the beginning of identity, being a function of behavior by helping people begin to identify as the hero, engaging in relatively straightforward behaviors like cleaning your room or like in the new book, making an area beautiful, refusing to give into resentment, aim at one thing, which fuck was one of my favorite parts of the book and see how extraordinarily good

you can get at that. Like when I think about something. Yeah, that's a good thing, yes, you got to aim at something. It's like otherwise your life is meaningless. Well, what should you aim at? Well, I don't know. Well, pick something, pick something, aim at it. As you move toward it, you aim at? Well, I don't know. Well, pick something. Pick something.

Aim at it. As you move toward it, you'll get wiser. Then maybe your aim will change. That's okay, but at least it'll change in an informed way. It's like discipline yourself in one dimension. See what happens? Well, that's exciting. And I think that's something that's open for everyone. You can do that. I shouldn't say that because I don't believe that. I think you can find yourself in situation that's so dire that you don't. There's no escape from it, but that doesn't matter because there's still. This is the hero myth might not be. The best we have might not always work, but it's still the best we have. And the fact

that it might not work doesn't mean we should throw it away. It's still the best we have. I mean, everyone dies. And so we fail in some sense. The fact that a symphony ends doesn't mean that it wasn't worth listening to. Yeah, when you put that in an evolutionary context and you acknowledge that people are compelled by biology to strive, they're compelled by biology to progress, they're compelled by biology to be courageous, that they will be rewarded for being courageous. Neurochemically, they will be punished for being a coward, neurochemically.

And yeah, well, think about, you know, the thing about that biological explanation too, is that we've been social for a very long time. We've been social for so long that our social nature is programmed into our biology. And so you'll be punished if you're not useful to other people. Yes. By your conscience, because you're a social creature. And the question is, well, how could you be most hit? Here's another question that starts to what verge on the religious. What does the most useful person look like? Well, who is everyone hoping they'll meet? And that's a genuine question. And that's the ideal. The ideal is the person everyone's

hoping they'll meet. That's Christ in the Christian culture, psychologically it, independent of any religious claims. So that's these, this is, I suppose the essential idea of the archetype from the union perspective. We have the image of an ideal. And because it is the ultimate ideal, it has a religious element. It's compelling. It's a judge. Why is it a judge? Well, if you fall short of the ideal, your conscience punishes you. So it's a judge. And it's merciful. Well, why? Because if you act out the ideal, then your life improves.

You know, when I said, well, the question, what is the relationship between these images of the psyche and reality. I don't know the answer to that. I don't know where the archetype shades into reality. It depends to some degree on how you define reality. And then, you know, this is, I've been, people don't like that statement. But when you're asking questions that are deep enough, you start to have to ask, what do you mean by true, for example, what do you mean by real? Because the questions you ask get so deep that they're of

the same kind as the question, what is real or what is true? You know, if think of it this way, reality is what we adapt to by definition. That's reasonable. If you're Darwinian, you have to say that's actually as far as you can go. Reality is that which shapes us. You can't get a better handle on reality than that. Well, when you make a picture of objective reality, it's not the same as that. It's a different picture, and it's not obvious which one should play Trump. Now, the hero myth, as far as I can tell, is an evolutionary artifact. And that means that for human beings, the hero image is the path of optimal adaptation, does that reflect reality?

Well it does in so far as reality has selected that. Well, does that mean that reality is a story? Because the hero myth is a story, or at least that's one of the things it is, does it mean that reality has a narrative aspect? Well, it does insofar as we act things out. Does that mean that reality is ultimately a story? Well, I don't know, but the answer isn't obviously no. In Rule 2, you say to imagine who we could be and then to aim single-mindedly at that. But reality gets in the way of you reaching that potential, and it can hurt how can people cope with the pain

of unreached potential? Well, part of, oh, that's a really good question. Look, every ideal is a judge. Right? So you pause it an ideal, and instantly you're in inferior position in relationship to that ideal and that can be crushing. Okay, so what do you do about that? Well, one answer is no ideals. Well, that's not a good answer because then you don't have anything to do. Right? So, and that deprives you of a main source of pleasure which is observed, a generated as a consequence of observed movement towards a valued goal.

So if you have a high goal and you see any movement towards it, there's a potential, there's a really powerful potential kick there. So you don't want to dispense with that. But then if you set up an ideal, it can judge you very harshly. So then you have to rearrange your reward philosophy and instead of punishing yourself from as a consequence of perceived distance, you reward yourself for incremental movement forward.

And that's not just theoretical. Look, I had was stopped by three guys on the street this week, three separate occasions. And they all told me the same thing. They said that they had read or something I wrote or listened to something or watched something and that it had been helpful. And whenever ever anybody says that to me, I always asked them, okay, exactly what was helpful and what changed because I want to know what's helping so that I can understand the target and hit it better. And so generally people are pleased to tell me, although sometimes it takes them a while to formulate exactly the description, but they all three of them said, I stopped comparing myself to other people. So I stopped comparing what I didn't have to what other people had.

I left that off the table. And then I started to reward myself for improving over what I was yesterday. So that's profound change because it means that you actually get your reward structure transformed. And that's a big deal, because that's your source of positive emotion and enthusiasm, encouragement, all of that.

So now you can start to encourage yourself for genuine improvement. And it's also pragmatically extremely intelligent because incremental improvement repeated is virtually unstoppable. And that's like the hallmark of behavioral therapy, that idea. Because what a behavior therapist does is you come and you say to me, I'm not, things aren't the way I want them to be. And then I say, well, well, how would you like them to be? And how are they not that? So we lay out the problem, the territory. And then the next thing we do is lay out a trajectory, which is okay, well, here's

something, you're lo and sum. You don't have a partner. Okay, so what are the incremental movements can you make towards that goal that you would do that would be helpful? And so maybe you negotiate with the person because that's what you do if you're a reasonable therapist. And you say, well, look, why don't you, you decide as a consequence of the conversation,

why don't you write out a description of yourself for a dating site? Don't post it or anything. Just write it out. And then let's see if you actually do that. And so then the person comes back next week and they say, I did that, and not only that, I posted it, and you say, great, what's the next step?

Or they say, geez, I and not only that, I posted it and you say, great, what's the next step? Or they say, geez, you know, I just kept avoiding that. And then you say, okay, well, we need to break that down. You avoided it. Well, could you write one sentence about who you are right now while you're sitting here? And sometimes they can do that right away or sometimes they can't. And then you make a microanalysis of that. And what you do is you reduce the magnitude of the move forward until you hit the point

where you actually will do it. And that's like the secret to good negotiation as well. If you're negotiating with your wife, maybe you want one of her behaviors to change. And then obviously she has to be on board with that and hypothetically that's going to be reciprocal process. But what you want to do is find a small improvement that is measurable, that's implementable, that will be implemented, that you can then reward.

And that's how you can have your ideal. You can have whatever ideal you want as long as you're willing to reduce your movement forward to achievable increments. But that's okay because they compound. So, and I really learned this as a therapist. It was one of the things that was so fun about being a therapist is you can take someone through this process and start them on just the tiniest goal. You know, and it just seems trivial, but they'll do it. And then they start moving faster, faster and faster after that point. Once the direction has been established and people make incredible improvement over, you know, not unreasonable spans of time. A few months, maybe a few years, but which is not nothing, but it's not decades, you know,

it's I saw that time and time again. So Aim high, but reward yourself for small incremental improvements, especially ones that repeat every day. Imagine who you could be, and then aim single-mindedly at that. That was a tricky one to have you do, because the chapter is an analysis of an old alchemical drawing. And so you had to be constrained in the recreation of that, because it had to duplicate all

the elements of the original drawing had to duplicate all the elements of the original drawing or my chapter wouldn't have made any sense. So. Which made it easier for me being constrained is easy. I know exactly what's supposed to be there. Yes, well people with an artistic temperament or maybe people with a wannabe artistic temperament often rail against constraint, but you want a lot of constraint, generally speaking, otherwise

you drown in choice. And that's a big problem. So this chapter describes this picture as a story that proceeds from the bottom up. You can take it in at a glance, but it also proceeds from the bottom up. And it's the emergence of personality, well-developed personality from nothing in some sense or from potential. That's another way of thinking about it. And it's an unbelievably sophisticated image, which is why it takes me a chapter to unwrap some of it. So, what, what, what, what did you, what was the experience for you of working on this image? I figured I was looking for one of the paintings to make inverted as opposed to black figures on white background, which is usually the case. I've done it inverted and I loved it. I loved

how it's black, as opposed to every original I saw on the internet. that makes it very magical. There are a lot of drag in there. So the way the picture works just as a hint is that, well, the bottom sphere in some sense represents that which attracts your interest. And then that can transform itself into that, which you're afraid of. So you might have an ambition, for example,

to pursue something you're interested in. But then that turns into a dragon because you're afraid of pursuing it. But if you do confront it, then that turns into you. That helps you develop your personality. That's that image in a thumbnail. It's much more to it than that, of course. I love it.

And so imagine who you could be and then aim single mindedly at that. See, I like that one. The single mindedly part is an interesting one. What I learned this at least in part from Nietzsche's, you know, when you're a kid, in principle, you could be anything, which is kind of one of the wonderful things about being a kid. And then one of the painful things about growing up and being an adult is that, well, you can't just stay be in everything. That's the story of Peter Pann. Right? Pann means everything. And Peter Pann is this magical child who can do anything.

But he's got a strange kingdom. He's king of the lost boys, which perhaps isn't a kingdom that you want to rule over. And so he doesn't grow up. And so he falls in love with Wendy. And Wendy grows up and she has a family. She gets old. She stops being a child But she has a family. She has a husband. She has a family She has a life and Peter Pan just stays in Neverland, which is also a hint on the part of the reader and he stays magical and Contents himself with Tinkerbell who I was think of her as the porn fairy and

I always think of her as the porn fairy. And... Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, And so Peter Pan, he doesn't want to grow up partly because his role model is Captain Hook. And Captain Hook, well, he thinks about, he's a pirate, so he's kind of a tyrant, and he's also a coward, and he's a coward because he's afraid, at least because he's being chased by a crocodile with a clock in his stomach. You think, what the hell does that mean? He's being chased by a crock at. What does that mean? It's like, well, and it's already got a piece of him, right?

It's bitten off his hand. It's like the taste. Well, it's time. That's why the clock is there, you know? It's time. And the crocodile is the terrible force that lies underneath everything that waits to pull you down, like it's mortality itself, and the threat of mortality. And the reason that Captain Hook is a tyrant

is because he's afraid of death. And so that makes him a tyrant, and a cowardly tyrant. And Peter Pan looks at the coward a tyrant is because he's afraid of death and so that makes him a tyrant and a cowardly tyrant and Peter Pan looks at the cowardly tyrant and he thinks well I don't want to grow up to be that and it's like well fair enough you know but what are you going to do not grow up? Well then you stay king of the lost boys and you have tinkerbell and life goes on and that's not a good outcome and so you know you have to make a sacrifice when you grow up. You have to become something. And to become something means to not become a whole bunch of other things. It's a sacrifice. It's the same sacrifice that you undertake when you decide to get married. It's like,

well, you forego everyone else to have one person. And it is a real sacrifice, and it's a sacrifice that prays on people's minds because they think, well, maybe I could have picked someone better. It's like, because you always suffer from the delusion that someone better would have agreed to have you. And while it's funny, I just read this great article. I tweeted a couple of nights ago. I read this great article about how people

select potential mates on dating sites and they, people generally go for those who are about 25% more attractive than they are. So, which is, you know, ambitious and pointless, but that is what people do, you know, they hope that they, by the way, they hope the person won't notice. It's like, I'll just slip myself in here and maybe you won't notice. It's like, well, so there's a sacrifice, you know. But the thing about the sacrifice is that you end up with something rather than nothing at all.

And I've seen lots of people in my clinical practice who didn't grow up when they should have, and who are 30, or which isn't too bad, although it's not that good. But 40, they're still drifting. They still haven't catalyzed an identity of any sort. And that starts to get ugly. 30 gets starts to get ugly around 30.

If you're 23 or 24 and you haven't catalyzed an identity, it's okay. People think, well, you're mostly Peter Pan, you're full of potential, man. We'll gamble on the potential, you know, and take a chance at you. But then if you're 30 and you have the same non-existent resume, people think, well, you just failed. It's not potential. It's just, you're just not there. And if that's the case at 40, that's getting really rough. Like it's not completely hopeless if you're in that situation at 40, but man, you got a lot of catching up to do. And so, how do you get out of that?

Well, partly, and this is one of the things you also have to let young people know is, pick something. You don't know what to do Well, take your best damn shot at it. Don't wait around man. Make a plan Aim at something move in that direction adopt a disciplinary routine of some sort because that will that will form you Now it limits you too, but it forms you and, you know, the thing about adopting a disciplinary structure, which limits you, which is the sacrifices, that it also, it also increases the probability that you're going to do something useful over the long run. You know, when I was starting out as a researcher, my area of research was somewhat narrow. I was looking at the hereditary,

I was looking at factors that influenced the inheritability of alcoholism, because alcoholism is heritable to a large degree. And it's partly because the manner in which you respond to a drug of abuse is determined in part by biological factors and that the variance in those biological factors is biologically determined to a fair degree. So I'll give you an example.

I had this friend, his name was Frank Irvin. He was a very cool guy. He looked like Ernest Hemingway and he was a cool character and he had this ranch in St. Kits. It was a monkey ranch. I know, I know, a monkey ranch. And he was raising alcoholic monkeys. And because he was a researcher.

And he would take these wild monkeys, green monkeys, and bring them into an enclosure. And then he would give them rum and coke. And 5% of the monkeys would drink Tacoma on first exposure. And he had videotapes of that, which were really hilarious. They looked like, they looked like frat party, fundamentally. And most of the monkeys would have a few sips and discuss their monkey business in a civilized way in a corner and then go home when it was time to call it a night. But there was 5% of them and they were like hanging

off the trees by their tail and their arms by the end of the evening and passed out completely. Anyways, one of his discoveries was that in a wild population of primates who were relatively naive to alcohol, that if you exposed a certain proportion of them, 5% of them had no control whatsoever over their drinking, they just drink right to coma. That's about the same with people who start to experiment with alcohol. So anyways, that's one of the examples that there was a biological influence. Anyways, this area of inquiry was somewhat narrower than I had hoped for.

I hadn't really planned on studying the psychobiology of response to alcohol. I was interested in drug abuse and drug abuse motivation. I was interested in wider issues. But what was so cool was that the deeper I got into that, so the more I discipline myself with regards to that particular domain of study, the more I learned about all sorts of other things, it was like going through a keyhole and then out the other side. And most disciplinary processes are like that. And so one of the things you have to do is you take the pluripotentiality of childhood and you Discipline that so that that that might be a meta rule like you couldn't say well

Here's the disciplinary structure everyone should undertake that's two specific a rule You know everybody should go into the military. It's like no not necessarily Who knows what your disciplinary strategy should be, but you can make a more abstract rule, which is something like, I don't care what your disciplinary strategy is, but you need to impose one on yourself, and for some reasonable amount of time, because you integrate yourself as a consequence of doing that,

as well as making yourself vaguely socially useful and appropriate, which is also an on-trivial thing. And then once you have yourself disciplined, then you can take that discipline stealth and you can start expanding it outward again. And so that's a really useful thing to know. So this is Nietzsche, who is a great criticism, great critic of Christianity,

was an admirer of Catholicism, interestingly enough, because one of the things he believed was that the attempt over several thousands of years to force every phenomenon into a framework that could be explained by the axioms of Catholic belief, disciplined the European mind. It made it capable of producing rigorous and coherent theories. Independent of whether the theory was correct, that wasn't the issue, it was like, well, once you learn how to write, you can write SAA,

but you could also write SAB. If you don't know how to write, you can't write either. In a maybe you learn to write by writing SAA, but then you can write SAA B and C. And the same issue applies here is, once you get yourself disciplined, then you can take the discipline self and you can go do a bunch of different things with it.

And so maybe it doesn't matter how you discipline yourself, but it really matters that you do. And so that's an important thing, I think it's an important thing for everyone to know, but I think it's really an important thing for young people to know. It's like, well, I don't know what to do with myself. Well, don't sit around and get old.

That's a bad idea. And spin around doing nothing. It's like, pick something. Make a mistake, right? Pick something that you're not sure about and go and pursue it. You get a quarter of the way there, a half way there, you're a lot smarter because you've had to undertake a fair bit of learning just to get that far. Maybe at that point you find out it's not for you and you decide to make a left hand turn. You make a 90 degree turn somewhere else.

At least you fleshed yourself out in the pursuit of the discipline and don't wait around. You know, and I think that's, well, so that's what that chapter's about. And so...